Riddick

2013

The eager masochism and the near-lunatic self-aggrandizement are part of the selfsame very weird ball of congealed Diesel oil, and they make this movie, which could have been an energetic albeit routine sci-fi actioner under only slightly different circumstances, into something that much more ponderous and tedious.

First things first—namely a terrific, mostly dialogue-free 20-minute opening during which Riddick acclimates to his new surroundings. Finally, writer-director David Twohy manages a sustained sense of space-operatic poetry that eluded him in the bombastic .. Once the film introduces the mercs, however, things settle into an all-too-familiar groove.

...We get relatively little insight into the other characters as they react to Riddick. Without an unknown force to spark our own imaginations, the result is mostly dead air... That said, there’s something to admire in Riddick’s initial willingness to be patient with its story, to quietly follow its hero and then, after the other characters arrive, to soberly watch them interact.

I can't say, beyond this, that I know what the movie's about since it abandons almost all of the space camp of the first two installments, especially the second. All three films were written and directed by David Twohy and, plotwise, this one is by far the most pointless... I've never seen a Vin Diesel movie in which the other performances make his seem as if it were being presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but here we are.

This is junk food, but it has some tasty bits. The structure is intriguing, for a start, a three-act construction that might be described as White/Black/Gray... Then of course there’s the dialogue – much of it delivered in gravelly voice-over – adding frequent notes of portentous idiocy.

Twohy, who has become a markedly more confident filmmaker with each successive movie... has a grand old time, setting the action against matte-painted vistas that recall many a 1960s space opera and framing it all in spare, deep-focus widescreen compositions... And where “Chronicles” overdosed on cartoonish CGI, “Riddick” returns to the “Pitch Black” formula of mixing animated elements with practical effects and puppetry...

Superficially, it's a very different type of film [from 2001: A Space Odyssey], with its salty, hardboiled dialogue, shlock B-movie plot and a veritable rogues gallery of slathering CG space aliens for the human characters to duly dispatch. Yet etched deep into the imagery, at a sub-blueprint level, are palpable visual (and, indeed, philosophical) echoes of Kubrick's 1968 masterwork.

What matters above all is that Twohy has the pulpy visual chops to match his storytelling. Images of Diesel drunkenly sitting on a metal throne, fighting a tentacled monster in a cave, or scampering up a jutting rock during a rainstorm play like Tor paperback covers brought to life. In an era of high-falutin’ tentpole sci-fi, there’s something to be said for a filmmaker still devoted to crafting plain old genre pleasures.

Riddick initially struggles just to survive, an elemental fight that has a nice metaphoric resonance for the series. It’s as if, having almost lost the character amid so much narrative bloat, Mr. Twohy were returning Riddick and the franchise to their origins, stripping them down to their genre bones.

Whether it's the three-pronged narrative in Riddick or the drastic color shift in A Perfect Getaway, [Twohy is] eager to demonstrate the way movies—specifically mainstream movies—work to influence spectatorship. The classic Hollywood genre stylists sought thematic continuity and seamless construction, but Twohy, a hyperconstructionist and something of a neoclassicist, pulls the curtain aside to reveal movie machinery in all its nuts and bolts.

Twohy creatively uses CGI to make a bottle episode of a film feel huge (yet not too vast), but even against a massive, craggy desert, RIDDICK is an intimate film, with a modest and easily maintained cast and a narrative that allows some flexing while moving along with its protagonist killer's methodical plod.

Three poor man's John Carpenter films for the price of one. Twohy remains pretty decent in making something out of trite material and he gets some genuine strong moments out of the earlier man alone section, the remaining film do suffer some from its difficulting in making the mercenaries into anything more than exchangable spare bodies...

This one is split into three classic scenarios. The first is silent survival horror, the second a clattering many-against-one action film, and the finale a locked-room siege picture. The visual scheme shifts with each section. Twohy stays close on Diesel as he recovers, pulls back in longer shots for the action section and its string of mouthy mercenaries, and combines the two in the finale, in which the monstrous and the human battle it out.

Synopsis

Left for dead on a sun-scorched planet, Riddick finds himself up against an alien race of predators. Activating an emergency beacon alerts two ships: one carrying a new breed of mercenary, the other captained by a man from Riddick's past. –IMDB—
119 min